How is it that one of the most despised programming languages in the word is running (as Google claims) up to 75% of the web? Many nay-sayers will say “oh it’s just WordPress” or “oh, it’s just PHPbb”. But in doing that they are completely missing the point. [...] In the article Venture Beat says “PHP is moving to the Enterprise very quickly”. This is not true. PHP IS in the enterprise and has been for a long time. People just either don’t know it or refused to admit it.

He talks about the things that PHP does, including something interesting - it exposes the focus on the theoretical (the "ivory tower" as he puts it) and puts the focus back on the practical, real-life world of just getting things done. He suggests that Google's reasoning behind taking so long to get PHP up and running on the App Engine was just someone with "their blinders on" to the world of the practical that PHP fills so well.

Felix Geisendorfer has posted two new items to the Debuggable blog looking at suppressing errors in your applications - and no, that doesn't mean using the @ operator either.

As of late I am getting sick of some best practices I have taught myself. Never using the @-error suppressing operator quickly moving to the top of the list. Before you start crying out loud (I know you will), let me say this: I do not mean to encourage anybody to use the @-operator. Applying the practice herein introduced may result in permanent damage to your coding habits and could serve as a gateway behavior to writing shitty code.

He gives an example in the first post of a place where he failed to properly check to ensure an element existed before checking a element of it. The second post provides an interesting solution to the same problem - using empty on the element/subelement to check its existence.

Chris Hartjes has answered some more questions his readers have asked in a new post to his blog today. This time the focus is on XML handling.

Welcome to the 3rd installment of me answering reader feedback questions. Today we deal with a topic that I deal with every day at my day job — working with XML in PHP.

He talks about SimpleXML (and how well it does its job) and their (his work's) current method of handling the storage of XML in a database. He describes both their current process and his ideal one, how he'd want to interface with their eXist backend.